Nancy Jane Kopell

"Commuting diffeomorphisms" under the direction of Stephen Smale.

Nancy Jane Kopell was born in New York City on November 8, 1942. She received her B.S. in mathematics from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on "Commuting diffeomorphisms" under the direction of Stephen Smale. Kopell held a C.L.E. Moore Instructorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1967 to 1969, then joined the faculty at Northeastern University. In 1978 she was promoted to full professor at Northeastern. Since 1986 she has been a professor of mathematics at Boston University. In 2009 she became the first woman at Boston University to be named a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, one of the highest honors bestowed upon senior faculty members at that institution.

In July 1990, Nancy Kopell was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for a five-year period. At that time the Notices of the American Mathematical Society wrote about her:

Professor Kopell uses and develops methods of dynamical systems to attack problems of applied mathematics. She is especially interested in questions involving self-organization in physical and biological systems. With L.N.Howard, she has written a series of papers on pattern formation in oscillating chemical systems. Recently, with G.B.Ermentrout, she has been concerned with developing mathematics appropriate to analyzing neural networks that govern rhythmic motor activity, such as walking, swimming, and breathing. Such systems are, roughly, large collections of units, each of which is an oscillator or a close mathematical relative of an oscillator. The aim of the mathematics is to help sort out which properties of the units and their interactions have implications for the emergent properties of the networks. The techniques include extensions of invariant manifold theory, averaging theory, and geometric methods for singularly perturbed equations. The current work has led to the formation of a highly interactive group of physiologists and mathematicians, headed by Professor Kopell.

Kopell is currently co-director of the Center for BioDynamics (CBD) in the College of Engineering at Boston University. This multidisciplinary, interdepartmental center aims to train undergraduates, graduates, and postdoctoral fellows in leading techniques from dynamical systems theory and its applications to biology and engineering. She lists her current research interests as mathematical modeling of networks of neurons in vertebrates and invertebrates; special interest in networks having oscillatory behavior, such as those governing rhythmic motor behavior, thalamocortical and hippocampal networks; and use of mathematics to investigate how properties of cells and small networks affect the dynamics of the larger networks that contain them. James Collins, professor of biomedical